THE BATTLE OF THE BUILDS
GPUs We put AMD’s latest Ryzen 5 8600G to the test
PC GAMING has come a long way in the last 20-30 years. Let’s be fair—it has never been a cheap hobby. Consoles have and always will be cheaper than any PC you can buy or build, no matter what generation. In fact, over the years we’ve tried numerous times to forge the ultimate budget rig, only for it to still be more expensive than its console counterparts, and lacking performance somewhat as well (although admittedly that’s because PCs have better graphical fidelity as standard).
It’s a tale as old as time. But lately, with the cost of hardware climbing upward, it feels like getting your foot in the door for a decent PC gaming experience is starting to become almost impossible. Once upon a time, our budget builds were $400-500. Now, they average close to $1,000, if not more when including a dedicated GPU. Take a look back at the GTX 900 series— the 980 debuted at an RRP of $550, and the latest RTX 4080 hit the market at $1,200. That’s a 118 percent increase in the flagship GPU price in just eight years.
Is it all lost, then? Is humble PC gaming now out of reach for a large majority? Well, it got us thinking, and with AMD launching its latest batch of Ryzen 8000 series CPUs, complete with radically impressive integrated graphics performance, we decided to put its most entr y-level chip to the test in a somewhat budget $700-800 gaming PC grudge match.
All of this would be fairly moot without a good comparison, though. To really take this build and feature to the next level, we’re including two ‘alternate endings’. By stripping back our budget build, integrating one of our favorite CPUs, and combining that with two of the best budget GPUs around, Intel’s Arc A750 and AMD’s RX 7600 XT, we’re pitting the two styles of system against one another to see what that extra GPU investment might net you.
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CORE HARDWARE PICKS
CPU
AMD’s Ryzen series has, without a doubt, been an absolute hit. Its top-tier performance, incredible efficiency ratios, and stellar componentry has made it an absolute shoo-in for one of the best CPU architectures to date. It has pushed Intel’s own processors to the absolute limit from a competition front, and really helped AMD claw back even more market share.
The 8000 series, recently launched as an alternative to AMD’s Ryzen 7000 series desktop line, comes with dedicated iGPU componentry, specifically designed with gaming in mind. The 7000 line does have integrated graphics, utilizing two CUs pulled from the RDNA 2 GPU architecture, but it’s incredibly limited at a 2.2 GHz boost. The 8600 and 8700G, on the o
